At Combat Outpost Michigan, at the mouth of the Korengal, the company commander would tell a visiting reporter to expect the first barrage around 7 p.m. — two or three a day, like weather. Twenty-five years after 9/11, WarTalk marks the anniversary with the man who spent the next decade figuring out how that outpost got there.
Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley, the Colby Award–winning history of the war’s most unforgiving corner, built on embeds that began when he was a 19-year-old freelancer writing for a college paper. Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark host; Jordan is on dad duty.
We discuss…
Bubbles of danger — how outposts meant to secure Pech villages drew the war into them instead, and the battalion commander who was trying to sell a pullout at the height of the surge
The Korengal snowball — two Green Beret teams in 2004, one that refused to be used as muscle in a timber feud and one that went in as hard and as often as it could
Three tribes — conventional forces, CJSOTF, and the JSOC task force fighting disconnected wars in the same valleys, and the night raid that killed a man the infantry could have arrested at Friday’s shura
JDAMs and beanie babies — why battalion commanders measured whatever they could write down, and what the Rock’s stat sheet actually showed
he multicam juggernaut — a Brooklyn art school startup, Delta Force’s R&D budget, and a Ghost Recon producer at a Las Vegas convention
Lessons unlearned — the Asymmetric Warfare Group disbanded, CALL exiled to Leavenworth, and short-range air defense casualties in the Iran War
Listen now on your favorite podcast app.
Like Weather
Tony Stark: Twenty-five years since 9/11. Twenty-five years of GWOT, twenty-five years of chaos in the Middle East that still hasn’t ended and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. CENTCOM has consumed all things. To mark the anniversary, we thought there was no one better to invite on than Wesley Morgan, author of The Hardest Place, which is basically the story of a microcosm of the war. Wesley, am I missing anything?
Wesley Morgan: No, that’s great. It’s a book about the war in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley, which I use as a microcosm for the broader conflict.
Tony: With us today as usual are Justin, Jordan, and Bryan. Jordan is being an excellent father right now, so the rest of us will run the show while he sits in the background.
Wes, the book is an incredibly detailed account of commanders and individual actions on the ground. Why did you get after this?
Wesley: When I was in my early twenties, I was spending a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan as a freelance journalist. This was my fourth trip into the war zones — my second to Afghanistan after two to Iraq. I was in Afghanistan for the summer of 2010, the peak summer of President Obama’s surge, as all the surge troops were arriving in theater.
What I would do is bounce around to different battalions. If it was a three-month trip, which this one was, I’d split it up between four battalions in different places. I wound up going to a battalion in the Pech by happenstance, because an embed somewhere else got canceled and somebody said, last minute, maybe you should go to this one — there’s a good battalion commander there.
So I went out not knowing much about it other than that it was where the Korengal was. The Korengal was very famous at that time. As America returned its attention to Afghanistan after the Iraq surge, the Korengal had become emblematic of the war in popular media. I got to the Pech in July 2010. US forces had left the Korengal about three months earlier and had essentially retreated — they now manned just a string of outposts along the Pech Valley floor. If you imagine the veins of a leaf, the Pech is the spine, and there are these smaller valleys running off of it: the Korengal, and then less famously the Waygal, the Shuryak, the Watapur, which had all claimed American lives in the preceding nine years.
I got to Forward Operating Base Blessing, down the Pech, and from there Combat Outpost Michigan, the one at the mouth of the Korengal. I was really taken aback by everything I saw. It was very different from everything else I’d seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. For one thing, there was vastly more ordnance being expended by both sides than I’d ever seen. This outpost is sucking down recoilless rifle rounds. AGS-17s — the Russian version of a Mk 19 grenade launcher — would be dumping rounds into this place, and then of course mortars and rockets all the time. It was like clockwork. You arrive and the company commander tells you, “You should expect one around 7 p.m. We get two or three of these a day.” Just like weather.
I was also struck by the terrain. It’s a crazy-looking place, much greener than other parts of Afghanistan. Instead of big plateaus, it’s very sharp, jagged mountains that rise right up from the valley floor — very difficult terrain for fighting, and especially difficult for helicopters.
And one thing that was very striking was that although there was this huge amount of ordnance being expended in these engagements out of COP Michigan, it was also very routine. There were American soldiers who were hurt during my stay at Michigan, but it was a heavily fortified place at this point, concrete everywhere, and the soldiers treated these barrages like weather. For the most part it was a relatively safe place to be, despite the torrential downpour of incoming fire hitting it all the time. Likewise, you got the strong sense that the enemy up in the hills wasn’t taking many casualties either, because they had it down perfectly as well. They knew exactly how many minutes it would take before the 81mm mortars started hitting after they initiated a contact, how many more minutes until the howitzers from FOB Blessing started hitting, and how many more until fast air showed up on station and started dropping JDAMs. They would scurry back into the caves before that happened.
So what it felt like was that not too many people were getting hurt or killed on either side. Who was stuck in the middle was the villages outside the US outposts. I knew from counterinsurgency doctrine and the broader strategy of the war that these outposts were supposed to be providing security for these villages from the Taliban. Instead, rather than being security bubbles, they were kind of bubbles of danger. They were drawing conflict into these villages in a way that did not seem to be endearing the American presence to them — which was certainly borne out on patrols. People were over it. They were really, really over it.
And finally, the battalion commander in the Pech at the time was a guy who was very frank about all this. Everywhere else I went in Afghanistan that summer, the battalion commander would be saying, we’re going to build this many more combat outposts, pave this many more kilometers of road, spend this much CERP money, push the ball this much farther down the field by the time the next guy gets here. This battalion commander in the Pech was very frank: “I’ve been here before in this AO. Things have gotten a lot worse by virtue of our presence, and I’m trying to sell a pullout.” That was interesting and bracing to hear from a battalion commander at that point in the Afghan surge, when all the incentives were telling him, no, this is the time for expansion and COIN and outposts and roads.
Stoplight Charts
Justin McIntosh: That’s actually a really good point. One of the things you started seeing in the global war on terror generally — you’d definitely already seen it in Iraq by this point — is that every deployment would start with a stoplight chart: red, amber, green. No matter what the previous unit had done in their area, they’d come in and it would be red. Midway through the deployment it would have switched to amber, because they’d met some magical metrics. And right around the end of their tour, as they’re getting ready to RIP, they’re briefing the commander: “Look, sir, it’s all green in our area.”
But then you talk to actual people on the ground and they’re like, realistically, white space only exists wherever we step. As soon as we take the next step, the area that had been white space is back to being enemy-controlled or contested. That was one of the very hard things to press. Pre-staging this 2010 period, in the same area, you had the Battle of Wanat — the 173rd, right there — where they were attempting to establish these early bases. And that was not the “you shoot at us, we shoot at you, everybody knows the routine” version. That was a lot of people getting injured and killed as the enemy actually tried to fight the US out. It seems like around this time the insurgents realized: we’re not going to beat the Americans, and we don’t have to. We just have to keep being there and challenging them, and eventually they’re going to leave. That was my take at the time on what had happened.
Wesley: The Battle of Wanat is July 2008, a couple of years before this. That was in the Waygal Valley, just north of Blessing, so very much part of this Pech ecosystem, and the book covers all those events. But after visiting these outposts, I was just like, well, what the fuck was going on here? What did I just see? Who built those outposts there, and why, and when?
Initially, many years before the book was published — I was going back to be a senior in college and had to write a senior thesis — I just wanted to understand who built each of these outposts and what the story was on each one. The project evolved from there. One of the big themes that came out of it, which was not obvious to me in 2010, was how much the US military had changed even just between the 2006-to-2008 period, when these outposts were being established, and 2010. Some of them had been established much earlier — the main forward operating bases had started as little outposts in 2002 and 2003, because this was an area where US forces had been at it for a long time relative to other parts of the country, where they’d had a much more episodic presence before 2008 or 2009.
What you see is US forces becoming over time less flexible and less mobile. They become buttoned down into big, heavy outposts because they’re trying to avoid another Wanat, and buttoned up into increasingly heavy, roadbound vehicles because of the IED threat. So by the time you hit 2010, US forces are not fully roadbound, but pretty roadbound, other than the occasional air assault they can muster, which has to be planned months ahead to get the Chinooks. Compare that to 2006, when 10th Mountain went up into these areas and established a lot of these outposts: they did it in pickup trucks and ATVs. The IED threat had not been as great — there were a lot of IEDs, but they weren’t as big — and there weren’t the same theater-wide, top-down force protection requirements. So US forces overextended themselves beyond what subsequent units were able to sustain, because these rules and the appetite for casualties meant subsequent units physically couldn’t routinely get to places 10th Mountain had reached pretty regularly in 2006 and 2007.
The Korengal Snowball
Tony: There are a bunch of rabbit holes I could go down here. One of the earlier parts of your book is the transition between two ODA teams and how that became symbolic of the entire war — how the first team really didn’t want to enter a valley they felt they had no business going into, and was trying to focus on inkblot tactics. Walk through that.
Wesley: The Pech Valley in 2004 was a case study in what people sometimes call the Special Forces or Green Beret identity crisis in the GWOT. You had two teams that each did six months there in 2004. One was an older team with more career experience but on their first GWOT combat deployment, from 19th Special Forces Group out of Utah — so National Guard guys. The second was an active-duty team from 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, already on their third combat rotation post-9/11. These teams could hardly have been more different, despite everybody having gone to the same schools.
The 19th Group team was trying to do the inkblot thing. They were focused on building a little security bubble around the district center — Nangalam, FOB Blessing — and training up a militia. The ANA and the National Police hadn’t really settled into the forms they were going to take, so at that point they were really just building a US-funded militia, but they were trying to start doing patrols and security, expanding out from this district center to expand the writ of the government, with the US standing in for the government — which becomes a problem, because it’s not sustainable. But that’s what they were trying to do, and they took it seriously, and they were discerning about it. They were getting human intelligence tips all the time — from the Afghan militiamen they worked with, from their interpreters, from other informants — and a lot of that intelligence was telling them the enemy’s in the Korengal, go to the Korengal, go up there. And the ODA commander, the National Guard Green Beret captain in charge, wasn’t into it. He was like, I don’t understand exactly what’s going on here — it’s going over my head — but there is something at work that is trying to draw me into the Korengal that I had better resist.
The 3rd Group team, when they rotated in, did not have that attitude. They immediately went into the Korengal, and they went in as many times and as hard as they could, because they quickly realized it was a place where they could get into gunfights. It was where the enemy was, and they saw their mission as finding and engaging and killing whoever the enemy was — not just al-Qaeda, but whoever was there. The acronym at the time was AAF, anti-Afghan forces, the euphemistic catch-all for all stripes of insurgent.
What was going over this 3rd Group team’s head — and had been going over the 19th Group team’s head too, but they’d had the maturity to recognize it — was that the Korengal was the center of a timber struggle. The forces allied with the ODA down on the Pech Valley floor represented one commercial interest, and the Korengalis represented a different one. So the Green Berets were being used as muscle on one side of a timber dispute. The 3rd Group team fell into this trap and started the Korengal snowball rolling. From there it evolved into this kind of Colosseum where US forces were fighting local insurgents, but the local insurgents had also called in big Taliban, who’d had a very limited presence in Kunar before 9/11. It became an arena for very intense, visually arresting, dangerous combat in the years that followed.
Justin: On the identity crisis within Special Forces — I would have just been joining around the time that 3rd Group team was getting there, and there was definitely a legacy of the guys who’d been involved pre-9/11. My first team sergeant was a pre-9/11, invasion-of-Afghanistan guy, and he’d talk all the time about, hey man, no, you do it through other people. That’s the whole point of the job — to get other people to do the fighting. If we’re having to get into gunfights, we’ve messed up.
Very quickly, within a couple of iterations, as those older guys got promoted up the chain or retired, you started seeing that change to where it became very aggressive. It was, we’re going to do F3EAD — find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, disseminate — continually doing hits and night missions. That became the poster child. Even when Special Forces at the time would say, no, no, we want to be the by-with-and-through people, empowering others, unconventional warfare — every recruitment poster we had was somebody kicking in a door or somebody doing a HALO jump. Which is great. I was on a HALO team; I loved doing it. But there was a pretty fundamental break between what was actually going on on the ground and what we were being asked to do, versus what we had doctrinally told ourselves our job was.
That was reinforced by commanders like Odierno in Iraq, and honestly even McChrystal and Petraeus to some degree in Afghanistan, because they could trust Special Forces to go out and do missions they didn’t necessarily want conventional forces to do. They continued to use them as this weapon to go smash the bad guys, for lack of a better term. And it just reinforced those bad lessons: you just need to go find where the bad guys are. It doesn’t matter. Just go get the bad guys. And like you said, a lot of what that initially was was intertribal disputes, and we were basically picking the side of one of the aggressors and giving them muscle to push over their enemies.
Wesley: Exactly — in a way that then invited the insurgency to grow, and created incentives for locals to make connections with the broader Taliban.
Tony: Years later, by the time I joined, it was a known fact in the infantry that if you want to be a door kicker, go SF, go Regiment. That was the default assumption: if you actually wanted to go do stuff, that’s where you went. Which, if you look at the history books, is very different from the Cold War perception of Regiment, of Delta, of SF. That’s a different mission set, a very specific one, which is hopefully what it returns to at some point. But by the 2010s it very much was: if you want to do the cool infantry shit, go do SF.
Three Tribes
Wesley: We should draw a distinction here. In the book I talk about different tribes of the US military in Afghanistan. You can break that down in various ways, but the way it manifested in the east was: you had conventional forces; you had what was called the CJSOTF [Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force], which was the Green Berets, responsible for all things special operations that had a partner — running the ANA Commandos and doing the Afghan Local Police, two very different things, and it was always interesting to hear how a particular company or battalion prioritized those and which teams they assigned to them, because that tells you a lot about what the organization valued. And then the third tribe was the very separate JSOC task force, which went by numbered code names — Task Force 373, Task Force 310 — and consisted largely of SEAL Team 6 and the Rangers, with some Delta thrown in. Their job was the pure direct-action night-raiding mission: living at some big airfield, flying out at night to do hits.
The Green Berets, in a certain way, had more in common with the conventional forces, in that at least the ALP teams were out living somewhere with people, at some little outpost. The commando mission probably had a little more in common with the JSOC mission — living at a big airfield, going out to do not targeted hits but maybe valley clearances, and coming back after three days. So those were the three tribes, and they were all doing disconnected things that sometimes supported one another and at other times really stepped on each other’s toes.
That’s one of the overarching stories of the US war in Afghanistan: different parts of the government pursuing missions that ultimately aren’t compatible. Outside these tribes, you throw the CIA and its counterterrorism mission in there, and that adds another layer. They make things harder for each other as they go. The classic example with the task force — they always called the JSOC task force “the task force” — is they come in and do a raid and kill a bunch of people getting a guy, and the infantry company commander in the area realizes in the morning: we could have just arrested him at the shura on Friday. He would have come quietly. We know him.
The flip side is that sometimes the task force could go up into a valley the conventional forces couldn’t reach anymore because of the way resources were centrally allocated. Conventional forces couldn’t get up into the Watapur Valley anymore. They couldn’t get up to Tsangar the way they had in 2006. Only the task force could do that. So over the years, conventional forces were kind of neutered, to the point where special operations forces were playing offense for the broader ISAF counterinsurgency mission, as opposed to doing narrower counterterrorism. I think that was deleterious for the conventional forces too — to have the ability to hit back taken away from them and given to somebody else who often didn’t really understand the battlespace.
JDAMs and Beanie Babies
Tony: Can we go back to the metrics for a second? Especially on the conventional side, you have commanders who are struggling to find the enemy, struggling to get after the mission they deployed for, but also trying to justify their existence and their future and their career, because those things are interlinked. If you talk about miles of road built or combat outposts built or meetings held — looking back, absolutely none of that is a metric you’d use for success. Roads are a very important engineer mobility mission, but that’s a component of a broader mission, not success in and of itself. Same with meetings. They’re all enabling factors. When you talked to commanders on the ground, did they truly believe in those as the metric for success, or was it just the only thing they could write down?
Wesley: I think often it was the only thing they could write down, or the only thing they could wrap their heads around. Certainly there were commanders who understood the counterinsurgency stuff in their bones — it was second nature to them, they understood dealing with people, they just got it. And then there were a lot more commanders, I’d hazard, who didn’t, and for whom this was the flavor of the day. This is what they’re being told, these are their orders. It doesn’t matter whether it feels good or whether it’s what you joined the Army for; it’s what you’re being ordered to do, so you do your best. But they didn’t relate to Afghans. They did not enjoy sitting around the shura table. They did not enjoy working on development projects. So it became: well, what can you measure?
There’s an example I give in the book. There’s a battalion that fought up in Kunar — the one that was involved in the Battle of Wanat, that lost two dozen soldiers over a fifteen-month deployment, including nine that day. This is 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, out of Italy — the Rock. The Rock was commanded by a very charismatic leader, a great guy I’m still in touch with, then–Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund, who looks like he came out of We Were Soldiers, like a Mel Gibson character. A picture-perfect battalion commander and a great Army officer, and one who really threw himself into counterinsurgency, but not one to whom it came naturally. By his own description, the only Afghans he ever felt any connection to were a handful of Afghan Army officers, because there was something in common he could latch onto.
I used to get into it with him when I was doing the book: what did your deployment accomplish? And he would say, well, we delivered this many JDAMs and this much artillery, we had this many contacts, we spent eighty percent of the brigade’s CERP budget, and we handed out ten thousand beanie babies. These were the things he was measuring success by. And none of them showed anything — in fact, they gave a very contradictory message. If you’re both handing out ten thousand beanie babies and you’ve called in more artillery rounds than any battalion in the country, that’s a complicated picture you’re painting. It is not a portrait of success.
Why They Joined
Tony: I want to pivot to 25 years of war — really 20, if you count from entering Afghanistan to leaving. I’m also reminded, looking at my social media feeds this week, that it’s 25 years of Band of Brothers. Through my Army career, and I think everyone’s, Band of Brothers was the thing. Lieutenant Winters’s assault on the German artillery on D-Day is the textbook thing; it’s what everybody shows. So many people joined because of that, or because of Black Hawk Down. But Justin, you had a good point in your piece this week: why you joined wasn’t necessarily 9/11, because it wasn’t immediately after. The people who joined in ‘01 are not the same people who joined in ‘03 or ‘07 or ‘14 or ‘18. Wes, as you went through your research, what did you see as the common factors for why people ended up over there? And what were the weird standouts?
Wesley: It’s funny you mention Band of Brothers. I was interviewing a former Delta Force operator the other day, and he was talking about how at the time of the invasion of Iraq, on their first rotations to Baghdad as they were standing up the so-called Baghdad SWAT mission — where they’d go out in the Little Birds and do what everybody in the military saw as the coolest thing you could be doing — they were watching Band of Brothers every night. That’s what they would come back to.
In my experience, the popular media I remember being dominant was Black Hawk Down. Black Hawk Down was everywhere. The movie comes out in December 2001, and the soundtrack, lines from that movie, whole scenes that soldiers could recite —
Justin: “This is my safety.”
Wesley: Exactly, the finger on the trigger. Black Hawk Down was huge.
I will say, my experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was infantry units and cavalry units, with a little bit of Green Berets thrown in. I was not spending much time with logistics units or field artillery units, so it’s not a representative sample. But in these infantry units, a lot of it was just young men who wanted to go to war and fight. That’s what they were there for. There were places where they were disappointed — the vision of war they got was very frustrating and not at all what they had wanted from Band of Brothers or Black Hawk Down. And then there were places like Kunar and the Pech, where it really delivered, and you felt like you were doing what the Army does and what the infantry is supposed to do.
Justin: I have probably watched at least an episode of Band of Brothers, if not the entire series, on every deployment I’ve ever been on. That and Tropic Thunder were my go-to deployment things — also an amazing war movie that everybody should watch. It still cracks me up.
But I was a kid at Fort Benning, Georgia. That’s where we lived in 2001, when September 11th happened and when Black Hawk Down came out. So the night it released, I watched Black Hawk Down in a theater at Fort Benning, surrounded by high-and-tights and Ranger kids and kids who wanted to be Ranger kids. It’s something you don’t realize when you’re growing up in it — that that is the culture. But there was definitely a break, because that wasn’t the reason I joined the Army. The reason I joined the Army was that it was there, and I was looking for something to do that wasn’t college anymore. By the time I joined, just a few years after September 11th, it wasn’t a dominating thing. I’d be interested in Bryan’s perspective. When you came in, what was the motivating factor, and what was the Navy’s thing?
Tony: It’s Hunt for Red October. We know the answer. It’s got to be Hunt for Red October.
The Navy’s War
Bryan Clark: I joined the Navy in the eighties, during the Reagan buildup. The economy in the early eighties was terrible — unemployment was relatively high, interest rates were high. We didn’t realize how bad it was, but it wasn’t great. So a lot of people joined the military because it was a good option. You could see Reagan was putting a ton of money into the military and pay was likely to go up, even though the experience of most people we knew who’d been in the military was very negative, because it had been Vietnam, and the post-Vietnam military was kind of a mess.
I enlisted in ‘82. When I went off to boot camp, you could still have beards. There was still a drug problem — they had just instituted drug testing, and guys were popping positive all the time. Back then you could get a mulligan, basically. Guys would pop positive and get a waiver, a dispensation to continue, because it was so prevalent you had to start somewhere. It was a very different era. The reason people joined was mostly economic, because at that point the military did not have a great reputation, though Reagan was doing a lot to build it up.
By the time 9/11 happens, I was an O-5. I had just taken over as operations officer at the Navy’s Nuclear Power Training Unit in Charleston. I’d been there about three weeks and thought, this is a great job — I get to supervise all these facilities and the nuclear plant operations. Theoretically security was also something I was in charge of, but I didn’t care that much about it. They had it. It’s fine. Then 9/11 happens, and suddenly we’ve got to lock that place down, because everybody’s worried about a terrorist attack on this nuclear facility sitting out on the Cooper River. There was basically no protection. People would drive by on the river all the time, right next to these nuclear-powered submarines sitting in the water with no defensive measures at all. We had to mount a pretty big campaign to improve that. A lot of people of my generation had been used to the Cold War military and then the post–Cold War military, which had not been very challenging from an operational standpoint, and suddenly we were thrust into this very different world.
Wesley: On the Navy’s role — one fascinating representation of how the Navy and the Air Force got in on the ground war comes up in The Hardest Place, because the provincial reconstruction teams for both Kunar and Nuristan were led by a succession of submarine officers, nuclear engineers, naval aviators. Sam Paparo, the INDOPACOM commander, led the Nuristan PRT for a year that coincided with the Battle of Wanat. The Navy and the Air Force were sending their very best — the best command-selected O-5s — to do these jobs. If you look at the bios of a lot of admirals and Air Force generals floating around, there’s this little chapter that’s very different from the rest of their career, where they were in Khost or Jalalabad, out every day driving around in MRAPs doing counterinsurgency.
The Class of 2008
Tony: Wes, you have an encyclopedic knowledge of basically everyone currently running the United States military, because of all your time with commanders on the ground. What have you seen in the evolution of the commander, broadly speaking, from the early days of GWOT to now? And what’s been the strangest thing to witness as some of these guys have grown up and taken three or four stars?
Wesley: My first trip to Iraq was 2007. In 2007-8 Iraq, the two-star generals are guys who had never seen any type of combat when they were growing up. Maybe they’d been in Desert Storm; if they were Rangers, perhaps Panama. But they grew up in a peacetime Army. The battalion commanders at that time had come in pre-9/11, and the company commanders in 2007-8 had come in right before or right around 9/11. The guys who were the platoon leaders and company commanders and battalion commanders in the Iraq and Afghan surges — they are today’s colonels and generals.
The battalion commander in the Pech when I first visited was a guy named Joe Ryan, who is now a four-star general commanding this strange new creature, the Army’s Western Hemisphere Command, built out of FORSCOM and some other things. And anytime you see news about the promotion lists, as Secretary Hegseth pokes at them and pulls people off, every name is one I recognize from when they were a company commander. Basically, colonels right now were company commanders in Afghanistan in 2008, 2009, 2010. There’s one who appears in the book who was just pulled off the one-star list — he was seen as the best company commander anybody had ever heard of in eastern Afghanistan in 2008-9.
So that’s how I know the Army: this blip in time of junior and mid-level officers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan during a certain period. Today’s company and battalion commanders don’t know me, because the relationship between the military and the media has changed drastically since the time I was starting out, which was a really rare and privileged time of incredible transparency. Basically you couldn’t visit the task force, and that was about it. I showed up in Baghdad in 2007 as a 19-year-old freelance reporter, literally writing for a college paper, and they asked me, okay, which battalions do you want to go to? I said 1-28 Infantry in West Rashid, 1-14 Cavalry on Haifa Street, and off I went. Public affairs was there to facilitate your getting to the units you wanted to see at the platoon and company level in combat. So there’s a generation of Army and Marine officers who had a ton of exposure to reporters and became very discerning about how to deal with the media. Today’s battalion commanders and below — especially below — don’t have that. The media is just a scary thing that’s been held at arm’s length since the age of embedding came to an end around 2013, 2014. The relationship today is atrocious.
How Embedding Died
Justin: From your perspective, how much did the McChrystal incident affect that relationship? To me, that’s when it seemed to start getting different.
Wesley: Maybe that’s the way it was from the other side of the fence. From my side, it didn’t affect it. I remember being in Sangin when that happened, doing an embed with 40 Commando Royal Marines, a battalion that was out there taking casualties constantly in this horrible place. I came back from a little outpost where I’d spent a week without any internet, and the British battalion commander made a joke about McChrystal. I laughed, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then he explained. I didn’t notice a change until after Obama’s reelection, as the Afghan drawdown was happening.
2013 was the first trip I made where embedding was still very much a thing, but there started to be more limitations on it. It started to be, well, we’re not actually going to embed you with that unit, because the ANA is in the lead there — if you want to see that, go embed with the ANA. And I would do that. But then in Ghazni it would be: I said I wanted to visit 1-28 Infantry again, and they said no, you’re going to visit 2-16 Infantry, because we’ve got something going on there that we want to show you. It became more stage-managed and more limited.
I think it was a desire from on high to put the war out of sight and out of mind — particularly the fact that even as American forces were transitioning to a training-and-advising role, that advising was still combat advising. That was a complicated message, and the Obama administration did not like it being complicated. That’s really when it ended. Then, going back into Iraq in 2014, it just never began again, and subsequent administrations had no incentive to reinstate it or be more transparent.
The history of embedding is a fascinating subject that I’d love to do a Columbia Journalism Review deep dive on someday. It was the first Bush administration — Donald Rumsfeld, actually — who were the real proponents, who said we’re going to lean in on transparency. There’s a bunch of emails from L. Paul Bremer’s year as CPA administrator in Iraq, all archived in the UK, and you can read them. There’s a point in the late summer of 2003, as things are starting to get uglier in Iraq, where Colin Powell says internally, in the NSC or wherever, why are we letting these reporters come out on patrols and see us trashing people’s homes and taking casualties? And Secretary Rumsfeld is the one who puts his foot down and says no, we’re going to keep doing that. A fascinating role reversal from how you’d expect that conversation to go. But that’s the story of embedding. Sorry, I’ve wandered very far from your original question.
Justin: No, that was actually really good. By the emergence of ISIS in Iraq, what we saw too — I’ve talked about this before, at least with Tony and Bryan — is that from the US forces’ side, the message that had to be controlled was that risk to force really became risk to mission. The fastest way to end the de-ISIS mission was dead Americans. Part of that message was, Americans aren’t in combat. So obviously we weren’t going to have anybody near that, because in an insurgency there’s always a chance things end up behind you. The lines were drawn, but they weren’t super stark. That explains it to me. What’s more interesting is that you have a person like Rumsfeld — we have the term Rumsfeldian for a reason — being so open to, we’re going to get in front of this and bring them in. Do you think that was born out of his experience post-Vietnam? Why was the department open to it?
Wesley: I don’t know. I know more broadly, at President Bush’s level, he was invested in embedding and personally involved in starting it, as was the Pentagon public affairs director who created the program. I think the idea sat somewhere between, on one end, an idealistic post-9/11 idea that the American people deserve to see, and two, the idea that if they do see, they’ll understand it better — they’ll see it from the perspective of our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines. Which I think is true. Good news gathering definitely meant doing more than embedding, for that reason. By going out with Army infantry battalions, you saw the war the way Army infantry battalions saw it. You had the opportunity to see it that way, and you could grow beyond that if you tried. But that was the pitfall of embedding: if you didn’t round it out with other perspectives and spend time with Afghan and Iraqi civilians and armies, you could get a very blinkered perception of the war — one that in some cases really served the administration’s interests, and in other cases really did not, because often the soldiers fighting the war were not that into it as it dragged along.
Justin: If somebody had been embedded with me on my first deployment, as we got stretched to fifteen months, they would have found out that I really disliked the war in Iraq.
War Reporting Without Access
Tony: From a war reporting standpoint: there’s a false sense that sensors and video on the battlefield are pervasive and you’re getting the full picture. How is that shaping editors, and those who would fund war reporting, in their understanding of what you as a war reporter can go do? And what does the modern space of embedding and war reporting look like?
Wesley: I have largely shifted to retrospective work about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than covering current wars, for a variety of reasons. One of them is that it can’t be done the way I did it in my twenties anymore. One, states are not interested in that kind of transparency and embedding reporters with their forces. They can see all the downsides, and they don’t see the upsides. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian government is very restrictive about Western media visits to the front line. They’re kept brief, they’re rare — and to be clear, I haven’t reported in Ukraine; this is what I understand from colleagues. In Gaza, the IDF only allowed what they called embeds, which were essentially one period of daylight, gaggle tours of reporters brought in with a general. In the lingo of twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have called that an embed at all. We’d have called it accompanying a general on a battlefield circulation. The US military very occasionally will grant a reporter a few days on a ship or at a base in theater, but that’s all there is. To me, that’s the biggest restriction on that particular type of reporting.
The flip side is that reporting from the battlefield unembedded has become much, much more dangerous for journalists. It was dangerous in 2004 too — there were reporters getting their heads chopped off during al-Qaeda in Iraq’s initial big rebellion. But 2014 is really the year, when James Foley is beheaded in Syria, that a lot of newsrooms start cracking down on risk and saying, okay, we’re not going to sponsor freelancers on the battlefield anymore, because that’s crazy — when they die, it’s on us. So with the military having less appetite for casualties and newsrooms not wanting casualties, major newspapers covering Ukraine imposed restrictions on their reporters that are totally alien to how those same newspapers operated in 2008 Baghdad.
That’s certainly frustrating for people who experienced that version of war reporting. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do it; it means you have to find other ways. There are great reporters, of my generation and younger, who have found ways to get around this and still find the truth. Visual forensics, visual investigation of videos, is one of them. There’s a flood of video that comes out of every modern battlefield. The reporter is no longer where the video comes from. The video comes from everybody, everywhere, all the time, and the trick is to find out what of it is real. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the BBC have great visual investigations teams that have mastered how to exploit what’s coming off the battlefield from civilians to verify and illuminate what’s happening.
Justin: A personal anecdote. My brother was in the 82nd for a while, and he was at one of the bases in Afghanistan that Anderson Cooper was live-streaming from when the base got attacked. Instantly my mom is calling me: what’s going to happen to your brother? He was fine, nothing happened, but that was three days of dealing with that, because she’s just watching the CNN clip of Anderson Cooper going, “And now we’re getting shot at,” and people running to their positions. So on a personal level, I’m actually glad they do a little less embedding and live-streaming from the front lines. You lose a lot of control of the message when you give reporters free rein to show whatever they want.
Wesley: You do lose a lot of control, and that’s why it’s gone.
The Multicam Juggernaut
Tony: On one of your other favorite topics, Wes: how did multicam become everything over the course of the war?
Wesley: This is one of my favorite topics. It’s waned a little bit now — I feel like multicam is passé. But three or four years ago, this was something I was really fascinated by, because you were seeing a pattern that was suddenly on all sides of every conflict. Both sides in Ukraine wear multicam — the Azov Brigade literally has a metal band with a song called “My Skin Is Multicam.” The Russian military has adopted a multicam knockoff. The Taliban wears multicam. It’s just everywhere.
But it didn’t used to be. In 2007 and 2008 in Iraq, I didn’t see multicam. I remember first seeing it in 2009, in Wardak province in Afghanistan, on a Green Beret. It was exotic and cool. Even with no background, never having played any video game that multicam featured in, you could instantly tell: that’s exotic and cool. Cut to about a year and a half later, and the Army adopts it for all soldiers in Afghanistan, and eventually for all soldiers worldwide.
There’s a fun backstory here that I wrote an article for New Lines magazine about a couple of years ago — how multicam became the juggernaut it is today. It’s a crazy story. Multicam was invented by a couple of Brooklyn art school graduates around 2002, Caleb Crye and a couple of his friends. They initially tried to sell it to the Army, which in 2003-4 was looking for the successor to the old BDU and DCU, the two camouflage patterns you’d switch between depending on the environment. The Army held a big competition, and ultimately settled on the worst of all worlds, the pattern that went on the ACUs — the gray digicam, as I think of it. That actually kind of worked in Kunar. I have some cool pictures, including the one on the cover of the book, where soldiers are blending right into the mountain rock in their ACUs. But mostly, no — that was not the broad reputation of ACUs.
So multicam was passed over. It tested very well, but ultimately the Army went with its own option. The backstory that was not told at the time is that in Iraq, Delta Force was having none of it. They saw this ACU pattern, saw especially how it performed at night and how light hit it, and said absolutely not, we’re not putting that on our bodies unless it’s for a limited purpose like concealing ourselves within a conventional patrol. So they kept wearing the old DCUs, and with their big R&D budget and their authorities to test different things, they started testing commercial off-the-shelf camouflage patterns. One of the ones they tested, starting in late 2005, was multicam.
From there it spread. The British SAS adopts it because they’re working hand in glove with Delta. Green Berets start adopting it because they see Delta and the SAS wearing it. Then other foreign special operations forces start adopting it, and there comes a time in Afghanistan when basically all special operations forces — Australian, Estonian, Polish, whoever — are wearing multicam. It’s the marker of eliteness. That sheen starts to fade when the conventional military picks it up and deploys it at scale.
But the fun backstory of how it acquired that sheen: Crye, the company that made multicam, faced a dilemma after selling this stuff to Delta Force. That’s a huge win, but it’s one you can’t advertise at all. And it’s also one that’s not reflected in the photos coming back from the battlefield from embedded photographers. Today there are a million Instagram accounts that are just photos of JSOC operators — that’s a genre now. But at the time there were no photos of JSOC operators in combat, because embedded reporters didn’t have access to the task force. That was the one thing cut off from them.
So what Crye did that was very clever — I interviewed a video game producer about this; I’m not a video game guy, so I’m forgetting the name of the company, but it was the one that did Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon [Red Storm Entertainment] — this producer recalls being at a video game convention in Las Vegas in 2005, I think, where the Army had a booth. Natick Labs had a booth, and there was a Crye person at the Natick Labs booth. This video game guy recalls talking to the Crye guy and the Natick guy and being told, hey, you should feature multicam in your games. And he winds up doing that. It’s intimated to these video game producers that this is the camouflage of the elite, so it starts being represented as the camouflage of the elite in Ghost Recon 2 or whatever, and then in other video games — before there are photographs of it actually being the camouflage of the elite. It got out into the video game universe before it got out into the traditional media universe. So by 2009-10, young soldiers deploying to Afghanistan have played these video games and are familiar with multicam before they see it on a visiting special operator.
That’s how multicam acquired this sheen of eliteness, which I think is now on the downswing. Now what’s cool among collectors, among people fascinated by this stuff, is retro. They’re like, no, DCUs are cool, BDUs are cool. But that’s the story of multicam.
Tony: It’s really interesting on the video game front, because I’m — and I think Justin is too — of the generation where the blockbuster video games influenced whether we joined or not. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor were the two titles that really leaned into that.
We talked about Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers, but the video games influenced a lot of people too, and in less realistic ways. I remember my first driver when I was enlisted. He was like, I joined, and I was so confused when I got to basic and they didn’t put me in a juggernaut suit — the big EOD suits. It’s interesting to see how other people took that as the reality of what they’d get to do when they joined, instead of understanding, as we know it, that helicopter raids and so on are for a very particular set of skills. And the juggernaut suit does not count.
Wesley: What you do not do in those video games is collect census data from the neighborhood. You do not sit in the shura and learn all the elders’ names. That’s not a feature of the video game universe of war.
Justin: There was an Onion piece, circa 2006 or 2007: a video game manufacturer makes a realistic war game where soldiers sit around for nineteen hours a day drinking energy drinks and smoking cigarettes.
Wesley: The video game producer I interviewed — I remember him saying you could have placed multicam in a movie to start with, and it eventually is. The first movie appearance is Transformers.
Tony: I was going to guess that. I feel bad that I was going to guess that.
Wesley: So it does get there, but it was in video games first. And he said, with a movie, it’s a couple of hours, and people watch it three or four times if they really like it. You put it in a video game, that’s hundreds and hundreds of hours, and they’re interactive hours where people are selecting their uniforms. So they form an attachment and a bond to pieces of kit in a way you wouldn’t get by placing it in Transformers.
Jeans and a Fishing Vest
Justin: Just thinking of all the gear nerds out there who really do go through and collect all this stuff, both in the military and out. Man.
Wesley: It’s so crazy. I’ve been interviewing a lot of former SEAL Team 6 and Delta guys recently — specifically the ones who are in the public eye and have put themselves there, with memoirs and podcasts and so on. One guy who’s in the public eye but not totally comfortable with it says, yeah, I’ll get these DMs from kids on Instagram: here’s this photo from 2004 of you in the desert — what’s this pouch? And he’s like, I have no idea. But they know. They know.
Justin: I couldn’t have told you. There were people who would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on their kit. I put my kit together one time and used it until they made me turn it in and handed me a new one. I don’t care about this shit.
Tony: I don’t know what subreddit it is, but I remember there being a very popular picture of a Ground Branch guy’s kit. And it’s like, what do you think they’re doing? There’s a flashbang pouch. He’s got a couple weapons and some mags. It’s not magical, guys. But it’s that level of obsession.
Wesley: And of course the famous Ground Branch pic that I think is now making the rounds, as people come down from the multicam high, is a photo from Toby Harnden’s book First Casualty, about the CIA in northern Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. It’s Team Alpha, I think — one of the Ground Branch teams that went into northern Afghanistan — all posing before they go in. They’re all wearing jeans and a fishing vest and carrying an AK-47 with no special sights on it. That’s who went in and did the hardest, craziest stuff at the beginning.
Tony: That’s what’s wild about SOF and popular culture — Army popular culture going through GWOT — that ever-increasing obsession with the next tier up: this special unit upon this special unit upon this special unit.
Wesley: When in reality those special units were in a lot of ways counterproductive to the war. I’m working on a book now that gets into how stuff that worked in Iraq didn’t work in Afghanistan. You can trick yourself into thinking, well, because they’re the most special, they were doing the most important work in the war, or if only they’d had their hands untied, they could have won it. But that’s not how I remember it.
What Did We Learn, Army?
Tony: To close out, I’m curious about the stuff you’re working on now, which you just touched on. But two: there’s a lot of commentary that we’re going to forget all the lessons we learned in Afghanistan. Did we learn them during the war? That seems to be the analysis of your book — most of us didn’t learn these lessons anyway. So how much of that retention is worth it?
Wesley: I think there were a lot of things learned, at least at the low levels — platoon leaders, company commanders, battalion commanders. Perhaps not as much by some of the more senior guys, who just kept trying to do the same big air assault into the Watapur Valley every year, no matter what.
I do think it’s a real problem, the extent to which the Army is retaining this knowledge. I think it was Andrew Exum who said, pretty soon after the invasion of Ukraine, that Ukraine is going to be the best excuse the US Army ever found to never say the words Iraq and Afghanistan again. That has proved true. An early harbinger was when, in 2021 or maybe as early as 2020, the Army disbanded the Asymmetric Warfare Group, which was one of the heroes of The Hardest Place. The AWG guys — in particular a guy I call TW, an old, legendary Delta operator who was one of the founding AWG members — became the continuity in this war of discontinuous rotations. They could only do that at the very tactical level. There was no AWG for the things you need to know about your provincial politics; there was just AWG for how the insurgents fight in the Korengal, or how enemy sniper tactics work in Mosul. But a lot of that went away with AWG, and it’s not a good sign for AWG to be gone.
Justin: What the Army has done really poorly is that it created the Center for Army Lessons Learned — CALL — and that gave everyone an excuse not to do their own research. I can just wait till it gets put out, and whatever they put out, that’s it. We’ve done lessons learned; it’s this thing that sits over here. I don’t need a unit historian. I don’t need somebody pulling through reams of data and bringing up best practices and challenging our training when we go out — saying, hey, that wouldn’t work, and here are the reasons, and I can give you all the data. We divorced all of that thinking from the operational side and put it in a center at Fort Leavenworth. It might as well be in the prison, because that’s how many people actually go access it. I’m being slightly pejorative, but the truth is plenty of people don’t. CALL has to go on speaking tours around Army installations basically asking people, can you go to our website? Can you try to look at our stuff? It hasn’t become an ingrained part of who we are. We’ve just given it to another functional.
Tony: Justin, you and I were talking this morning about that article in Task & Purpose. Wes, if you haven’t read it, take a look. It’s the company commander from the cav unit that got routed by the Ukrainian unit at Grafenwöhr a few months ago. He says, well, we learned throughout. But the things he talks about are: well, we didn’t do spacing correctly when we first went in. That’s a perpetual lesson in the Army. That’s your Ranger Handbook. If we can’t even ingrain the things we know to be true in any type of war, I’d be surprised if we remember the things from our most recent one, which lasted twenty years and for some units is still going on.
Wesley: Sure. And there’s a reason the Army wants to focus on Ukraine and never think about Afghanistan and Iraq again: a lot of the Army’s core pre-9/11 skills degraded during those wars, because of the intense focus on every brigade doing counterinsurgency. It certainly went too far in the other direction as far as readiness. I remember, nine years ago now, when I was covering the Pentagon, I did a story about the 173rd Airborne Brigade. In 2017 they put out a big, alarm-bell, hundred-page lessons report that was basically, these are all the things the brigade is incapable of doing. They included short-range air defense, which was something that just didn’t exist anymore, because the Army had gutted it. Any NCOs still around who’d been in short-range air defense battalions had done a couple of deployments to Baghdad as provisional infantrymen. So that’s something the Army had to rebuild from the ground up, because there were multiple generations of knowledge gap. There weren’t sergeants who could train up the new privates. They just had to rebuild.
Now there’s a lot of new short-range air defense force structure. And I think three or four of the fatalities in the Iran War, the ones in July, were men and women from short-range air defense units. So you understand why the Army wants to move past Iraq and Afghanistan, but there’s a balance that has to be met.
Tony: Justin, this is not the first time we’ve closed an episode with “what did we learn, Army?” I guess we learned not to do it again.
Justin: That’s the thing. We just won’t do counterinsurgency anymore. We’ll stay out of those quagmire-y situations where we try to do regime change.
Tony: Surely there are no countries in the Indo-Pacific with difficult geography and six thousand languages, none of which US personnel speak. Surely there are none of them, and none of them are in proximity to the PRC.
Reading Recommendations
Justin: Wes, give us some reading recommendations before we close out.
Wesley: The Airborne Mafia, by Robert Williams. He’s a former squad leader in the Korengal with the 173rd, and now a school-trained military historian with a PhD. He wrote a book a couple of years ago about how the generation of airborne officers from World War II influenced the culture of the broader Army in the decades that followed. A fascinating book, and one where you can see parallels to the Ranger Regiment in the modern Army — it feels like every general came from the Ranger Regiment.
Another book I was rereading recently that’s great on similar issues — military and war, military and peace, how you meet the balance between the two — is The Caine Mutiny. It’s about young Navy officers in the Pacific in World War II and their collision with the older generation of Navy officers who kept the lights on between the wars, who they see as stupid and lazy, but who in fact were the ones who kept the institution alive and carried the torch. Those are the first two that come to mind. And I’ll plug my favorite novel of all time, which is not closely related but is a great book: The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson, if you want some hilarious and vivid historical fiction about Vikings.
Tony: Hell yeah. Wes, thank you so much for coming on. I think this was an excellent episode, and perhaps the only correct way —
Wesley: It was a pleasure. Thank you.